Canada Has Its Own Wonderteen And Bayern Munich Just Paid $13 Million For Him

Bayern Munich have completed a deal today with the Vancouver Whitecaps for the MLS team’s 17-year-old winger, Alphonso Davies, effective at the January transfer window after he turns 18. The German giants will pay $13 million for Davies up front, with various bonuses kicking in if the young Canadian international finds success with his new club. But even if those bonuses never get cashed in, the base price of the Davies transfer smashes the MLS record for an outgoing player, set a decade ago by an 18-year-old Jozy Altidore on his way to Villarreal.

This would be a hell of a lot more exciting if Davies were playing for the USMNT instead of scoring goals for the country up north, but our neighboring wonderteen is still very much worth cheering for. Davies, a refugee born in Ghana to Liberian parents, came to Canada when he was five and debuted for the Whitecaps at the senior level only 10 years later. Since then, he’s scored thrice for Canada in six appearances during last year’s Gold Cup, and he’s been a consistent creator on the left side for his club team. In 20 games so far this MLS season, Davies has six assists and three goals, including this stunner against DC United:

Davies’s dribbling ability is remarkably developed for a player so young, and when it’s coupled with both his unsettling speed and mature decision-making, Davies is a threat that’s impossible to ignore. Check out the acceleration on the first assist in this video, among the many other skills he shows off:

While Davies has earned himself a safe role in MLS, he has a long uphill climb for playing time at one of the top clubs in the world. Still, $13 million is no small investment from Bayern—for an extremely rough comparison, New York/New Jersey got $5 million from Chelsea for 20-year-old Matt Miazga in 2016—and Davies should get every opportunity to transform himself into, at least, the greatest Canadian soccer player of all-time. Unless you intensely follow Bundesliga youth teams, you’re not going to hear his name for quite a while. But by the time Canada co-hosts the World Cup in 2026, Alphonso Davies could well be one of North America’s star attractions.